Zillow taking over Yahoo’s real estate listings

Zillow and Yahoo Real Estate just announced a partnership where the popular real estate startup will take over Yahoo’s home for-sale listings and also work with Yahoo on advertising.

This follows a number of similar announcements from Yahoo — in January, Pricegrabber took over listings in Yahoo Shopping, and in May, Match.com took over Yahoo Personals. The biggest news in this vein came last year, when Yahoo said Microsoft would power its search results.

In the press release, Zillow and Yahoo paint this as a partnership between two online real estate giants — comScore ranks them respectively as the second and third most popular real estate sites on the Internet. Yahoo Real Estate head Steve Schultz said the deal “enables us together to better serve the advertising needs of real estate agents and brokers and bring highly scalable solutions to the market.”

Here’s what this “scalable solution” will entail:

• Zillow advertisers will be able to buy Premier Agent placement on Yahoo.
• For-sale listings from brokers on Zillow will automatically appear on Yahoo.
• Showcase Ads and Featured Listings will be automatically placed on both Yahoo and Zillow.
• Homeowners can buy their own for-sale listings and place them on both sites.
• The two companies “expect to work together” to sell display ads on Yahoo.

Seattle-based Zillow first became known for offering estimated home values, called Zestimates, for every house, but it has expanded far beyond that, most recently with rental services and mobile applications. It has raised $87 million in funding from backers including Benchmark Capital Technology Crossover Ventures, and says it’s aiming to have an initial public offering next year.